Humphrey Jennings by Kevin Jackson
Picador, £30
Kevin Jackson starts this biography by baldly stating that Humphrey Jennings was "Britain's greatest filmmaker." My initial reaction was: nonsense. But the more I read, the more I wondered whether Jackson might be right.
Jennings's output as a filmmaker was small: one feature-length "docudrama" (Fires were Started) and a dozen shorts, only four of which are significant: Spare Time, Listen to Britain, The Silent Village and A Diary for Timothy. And yet in those few thousand feet of celluloid, Jennings created a cinematic world that was visually and thematically rich and—that rarest of things—deeply individual.
Two factors, aside from the brief running time, have made Jennings's work far less well known than it should be in the canon of world cinema. The first is that his films were almost all made as wartime propaganda; the second is that they are all documentaries. But the associations which these words bring with them give completely the wrong impression of Jennings's work. Far from being strident, blindly patriotic or "educational," his films are pictorially fresh, oblique, humane and surprisingly moving. Lindsay Anderson called Jennings "the only poet of the British cinema." Vague as that description may feel, it comes close to pinpointing the effect of Jennings's delicate modulations of music, "natural performances" and montage. All of his films say something about what it means to be British which long outlives the original message—why a way of life was worth fighting and dying for in the darkest days of the second world war.
Jennings never really wanted to be a filmmaker. He looked down on it as a profession, seeing himself as a painter. But his paintings were rarely distinctive and lack the technical brilliance of his films. Jackson's book identifies Jennings's great problem—when given the freedom to do so, he spread the range of his artistic passions too thinly. Yet it was the very breadth of his interests which, in the fiery crucible of the war, concentrated and transformed him into a unique director.
Born into a determinedly "bohemian" family in Walberswick, Suffolk in 1907, Jennings was exposed to an array of unconventional childhood influences, including guild socialism, the mystical teachings of GI Gurdjieff and grandparents so obsessed with period architecture that they were happy to live with no front door on their house for several years, until they found the absolutely appropriate one. At Cambridge, his circle included the poet Kathleen Raine, the novelist Malcolm Lowry, the anthropologist Jacob Bronowski and the literary critic William Empson (on whose Seven Types of Ambiguity Jennings was an acknowledged influence).
Even as a student, the key to Jennings's intellectual topography was the combination of a passionate attachment to the artistic avant garde with a deep sense of spiritual connection to the English past. He believed that the true spirit of England had been lost during the industrial revolution and that the modern artist's job was to reclaim it. His great unfinished literary opus, Pandemonium, was an attempt to show the psychological effect of the arrival of the machine on mankind.
Jennings was a founder member of the British surrealist group—along with Herbert Read and Roland Penrose—and an organiser of the first British surrealist exhibition in 1936. Throughout the 1930s he produced a huge number of pictures using photographic collage—a favourite surrealist form—in which two or more disconcertingly different objects are brought together to create a "new reality" in the viewer's mind. It was this technique which can be seen in the unexpected montages of Jennings's best films.
Jennings the filmmaker was also a believer in another of surrealism's guiding principles: the importance of chance, or hasard objectif. In common with all the best documentary filmmakers, he knew that to plan things too much was to deaden the finished product. Instead, he laid himself open to what spontaneity would bring. Travelling once to a northern English port for a film about Britain's postwar place in the world, Jennings found a giant freighter called British Genius. He called the producer to express his satisfaction with the discovery. "Oh you do have the luck," said the producer, only to have Jennings retort that it had nothing to do with luck; it was merely "the truth that won't be denied."
Jennings's most explicit attempt to divine the "collective unconscious" of the nation came in 1937, when he co-founded the mass observation movement with Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson. The central idea was to record the everyday lives of Britons in order to provide what Jennings termed "an anthropology of ourselves." Volunteers were asked to describe in writing the minutiae of their lives on the 12th day of every month. Jennings's involvement in the project was short-lived, but it heightened his belief in the strangeness of the everyday and, crucially, forged an emotional contact with the working class that broke through the abstractness of his socialism. But, as with so many 1930s intellectuals, it was the war that gave Jennings a purpose. His patriotism, which once sat uneasily with his leftism and surrealism, came into its own. He became the "unofficial poet laureate" of the war. His films were propaganda only in the sense that they created truthful portraits of the British. Where John Grierson created the pedagogic, utilitarian and Presbyterian model of the documentary form with which we are still familiar, Jennings offered an alternative model of artistry in documentary film.
With this magnificently researched book, Jackson has done a service to the growing band of Jennings's admirers. But ultimately the claim that Jennings was our "greatest filmmaker" doesn't quite pass. What about David Lean, Nicolas Roeg, Carol Reed, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger? I would conclude more subjectively: Jennings was Britain's most interesting director. His real legacy is a documentary style that offers possibilities for making new kinds of cinema today.
Kevin Jackson starts this biography by baldly stating that Humphrey Jennings was "Britain's greatest filmmaker." My initial reaction was: nonsense. But the more I read, the more I wondered whether Jackson might be right.
Jennings's output as a filmmaker was small: one feature-length "docudrama" (Fires were Started) and a dozen shorts, only four of which are significant: Spare Time, Listen to Britain, The Silent Village and A Diary for Timothy. And yet in those few thousand feet of celluloid, Jennings created a cinematic world that was visually and thematically rich and—that rarest of things—deeply individual.
Two factors, aside from the brief running time, have made Jennings's work far less well known than it should be in the canon of world cinema. The first is that his films were almost all made as wartime propaganda; the second is that they are all documentaries. But the associations which these words bring with them give completely the wrong impression of Jennings's work. Far from being strident, blindly patriotic or "educational," his films are pictorially fresh, oblique, humane and surprisingly moving. Lindsay Anderson called Jennings "the only poet of the British cinema." Vague as that description may feel, it comes close to pinpointing the effect of Jennings's delicate modulations of music, "natural performances" and montage. All of his films say something about what it means to be British which long outlives the original message—why a way of life was worth fighting and dying for in the darkest days of the second world war.
Jennings never really wanted to be a filmmaker. He looked down on it as a profession, seeing himself as a painter. But his paintings were rarely distinctive and lack the technical brilliance of his films. Jackson's book identifies Jennings's great problem—when given the freedom to do so, he spread the range of his artistic passions too thinly. Yet it was the very breadth of his interests which, in the fiery crucible of the war, concentrated and transformed him into a unique director.
Born into a determinedly "bohemian" family in Walberswick, Suffolk in 1907, Jennings was exposed to an array of unconventional childhood influences, including guild socialism, the mystical teachings of GI Gurdjieff and grandparents so obsessed with period architecture that they were happy to live with no front door on their house for several years, until they found the absolutely appropriate one. At Cambridge, his circle included the poet Kathleen Raine, the novelist Malcolm Lowry, the anthropologist Jacob Bronowski and the literary critic William Empson (on whose Seven Types of Ambiguity Jennings was an acknowledged influence).
Even as a student, the key to Jennings's intellectual topography was the combination of a passionate attachment to the artistic avant garde with a deep sense of spiritual connection to the English past. He believed that the true spirit of England had been lost during the industrial revolution and that the modern artist's job was to reclaim it. His great unfinished literary opus, Pandemonium, was an attempt to show the psychological effect of the arrival of the machine on mankind.
Jennings was a founder member of the British surrealist group—along with Herbert Read and Roland Penrose—and an organiser of the first British surrealist exhibition in 1936. Throughout the 1930s he produced a huge number of pictures using photographic collage—a favourite surrealist form—in which two or more disconcertingly different objects are brought together to create a "new reality" in the viewer's mind. It was this technique which can be seen in the unexpected montages of Jennings's best films.
Jennings the filmmaker was also a believer in another of surrealism's guiding principles: the importance of chance, or hasard objectif. In common with all the best documentary filmmakers, he knew that to plan things too much was to deaden the finished product. Instead, he laid himself open to what spontaneity would bring. Travelling once to a northern English port for a film about Britain's postwar place in the world, Jennings found a giant freighter called British Genius. He called the producer to express his satisfaction with the discovery. "Oh you do have the luck," said the producer, only to have Jennings retort that it had nothing to do with luck; it was merely "the truth that won't be denied."
Jennings's most explicit attempt to divine the "collective unconscious" of the nation came in 1937, when he co-founded the mass observation movement with Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson. The central idea was to record the everyday lives of Britons in order to provide what Jennings termed "an anthropology of ourselves." Volunteers were asked to describe in writing the minutiae of their lives on the 12th day of every month. Jennings's involvement in the project was short-lived, but it heightened his belief in the strangeness of the everyday and, crucially, forged an emotional contact with the working class that broke through the abstractness of his socialism. But, as with so many 1930s intellectuals, it was the war that gave Jennings a purpose. His patriotism, which once sat uneasily with his leftism and surrealism, came into its own. He became the "unofficial poet laureate" of the war. His films were propaganda only in the sense that they created truthful portraits of the British. Where John Grierson created the pedagogic, utilitarian and Presbyterian model of the documentary form with which we are still familiar, Jennings offered an alternative model of artistry in documentary film.
With this magnificently researched book, Jackson has done a service to the growing band of Jennings's admirers. But ultimately the claim that Jennings was our "greatest filmmaker" doesn't quite pass. What about David Lean, Nicolas Roeg, Carol Reed, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger? I would conclude more subjectively: Jennings was Britain's most interesting director. His real legacy is a documentary style that offers possibilities for making new kinds of cinema today.
